First Blog

The  late, great mathematician George Polya has advises all (math) problem solvers to begin with a guess. What the? Really? This question was recently posted on quora.com.  Here is the response I gave. For any and every problem you face, if you haven’t experience with the problem, you first think about and then guess how to solve it. Based on this guess, you try to solve it. If it fails, you use this information and guess again. Life doesn’t usually give you a road map. Well, not quite. The chef has a recipe. The judge has procedures. The accountant has principles. Hence, the consultant.  However, the hunter, the parent, the student, the president, the citizen, and most others do not. They guess, at first. You must start somewhere. Hence, the guess, hopefully the educated or experiential guess. You begin life with no methods; your journey through life adds experience which helps. Polya’s guessing mandate is little more than common sense.

Listen all.  NOKO has no industry, no research, no university system, and no technology.  Yet, they are world class in ICBCM and nuclear weapons technology?  SOMEBODY  is helping them.  Their only problem is rolling it out slow enough so everyone thinks they are doing the research. Why does everyone talk about giving or not giving them more time in process?   They do have, however, world class hackers.  A lot cheaper.

Are you relevant? JC Pennys, as a long time retailer has dropped precipitously on the New York Stock Exchange. They may go bankrupt.  As observer put it, "I don't see a need for Pennys," at this point.   I shopped at Penny's often over the years.  Another dinosaur is Sears.  Ditto for Sears.  (Ask me about parking at Sears in the 50's.) Both have adopted the model of cash stations, where you take your item to a station to pay.  There is no longer any expertise associated with or available for what you want to buy.  So, why would I go there?  No reason I can think of - except to see the goods and then buy elsewhere. Keep this in mind.  "You have value as long as you have actual monetary value."  We see this with: a. Uber - why need those taxis? b. Teachers - why not learn online? c. Elevator operators - you have probably never seen one (once ubiquitous) d. Banking - no need for money transactions anymore, now only loans. e. Cars and g

It never ceases to amaze me that some folks, expert in one area, believe their expertise or excellence automatically transfers to another area. I mean, they really believe it!  Examples: physics → politics, business → education, any domain → sports, chemistry → religion, and so on. We’ll call this the transference effect or the transference phenomenon.  [I'm not sure if this note is an admonition to others or a personal admission; let's make it both to be on the safe side.] We restrict this note to arguments made outside one’s expertise, not within for which there are many more argument types. The expertise areas will be called domains . So, we are discussing the arguments made by a person, expert in one domain, toward conclusions made for another domain. For our purposes here we use the domains: Science, Education, Politics, Philosophy, Religion, Humanities, and Business. You may wish to add your own. The types of assertions we discuss are direct assertions